9
Even if she’d been on speaking terms with Roxanna, Devon wouldn’t have joined her family for Thanksgiving. She hadn’t been joking about her mother’s culinary skills. Roxanna was a lousy cook.
“We have a cook,” she remembered protesting one time as she’d watched her mother bustle around the gigantic kitchen, trying to look capable. “Why can’t she do the turkey this year?”
“I always give Bess the holiday off, you know that.” Roxanna had sounded even more irritable than usual. “Besides, your father likes it when I prepare a traditional Thanksgiving meal for him.”
Her father, God rest his weary soul, had dreaded Thanksgiving dinner every single year. But trooper that he’d been, he’d choked down her scorched drumsticks and dried-out turkey slabs with every evidence of pleasure. Then he’d
